Heroes of Newerth, the popular indie fantasy action-RTS game from developer S2 Games, has suffered from what the developer has called a "catastrophic hardware failure" Tuesday on its online servers. The server failure has apparently extended even to the game"s official web site which is now down. The HeroesofNewerth.com web site address is currently redirecting to a quickly made web page on Tumblr where the development team is giving updates on the game"s restoration progress.
According to the Tumblr site, "During our scheduled maintenance period this morning we had a catastrophic hardware failure across a number of systems including some of our backup systems." The note adds that while the development team feels it can get all the systems restored, " ... due to the extent of this failure we cannot provide an ETA on when service will be restored, we will continue to provide you updates as they are available to us."
In a post on the still working message boards, an S2 Games rep gives more info on what happened, saying, "We attempted to upgrade the processor on our database boxes. Both of our servers were simultaneously taken offline while the new hardware was being put in place. During this period of time, the file systems on BOTH boxes were destroyed." He adds, "This leaves us with no hardware to operate our DBs from until we can get new servers online. The reason for such a catastrophic situation is that this hardware is not the type that is simply sitting around, even in the largest hosting facilities in the world (in which we host at). We are scrambling to bring our systems back online temporarily so you can play the game through other short term methods while we get new hardware online."
The game has been having some bad luck of late. Just a few weeks ago Heroes of Neweth"s servers suffered from a denial of service attack by unknown hackers that kept players from joining games online.